Winter is supposed to be a time of relaxation and recharging of batteries - a gradual working through the boat jobs in preparation for the next cruising season.
In Finike it is a high pressure whirl of activities as detailed in the last blog but one. We haven't had a chance to make any significant inroads into the list of outstanding jobs and are leaving all of these until Birvidik is lifted out of the water for four weeks in March/April. There have also been some high pressure weather systems, producing Northerly winds which sweep down off the snow covered mountains. We've had temperatures as low as -3! This is Turkey, not Southern England.
Our cultural activities continued with the series of concerts given by the Antalya State Orchestra - the most recent being an evening of Russian composers. Mussorgsky was excellent (A night on bald mountain) and the Tchaikovsky was rousing stuff too, but I discovered that the intervening 45 years have failed to dispel my childhood aversion to Prokofiev. His violin concerto was not doubt a technical tour de force, but it still sounded like a rather poor school orchestra tuning up.
We've also been exploring inland, scrambling over the plethora of ancient Greek and Roman sites that are scattered throughout the area. Arykanda was a stunning complex, hidden up in the mountains and overgrown, Indiana Jones like, with the encroaching vegetation. Myra was down at sea level and representative of the era around 0 A.D., according to Bob's nemesis Sheila, who continues to foil his increasingly pathetic attempts to beat her into second place in the weekly quizzes.
Spending time in Finike, with its international yacht community, and in the sophisticated cosmopolitan atmosphere of a city such as Antalya lulls you into forgetting just how different Turkey is from mainstream Western Europe. This was brought home to us when we went to Demre to watch the camel wrestling.
As we waited in the cold on the outskirts of the settlement, a caravanserai of camels came down the valley to the site. A large area was being flattened with a JCB, which was then parading triumphantly around the arena. Bob reckoned that if it came down to a contest between a 200 kg camel and a JCB, then his money was on the JCB. Around the area was a pathetic strip of red and white tape, strung between lengths of bent reinforcing rod stuck into the ground. This posed no impediment to the crowds getting through for a closer look, but the patrolling Jandarma, with their ugly looking 1 ½ metre night sticks and sub machine guns acted as a fairly effective backup to the tape. However, as later became apparent, neither they nor the tape was any match for a brace of highly excited camels. You should have seen us run. Around the ring were flat bed lorries with tiers of seating, all of which were packed to bursting. Most were hard wooden benches, but the toff's lorry also had bench tables and paper tablecloths. Women and female children were segregated into their own couple of lorries, but there seemed to be no antipathy to females from our party mixing it with the boys, not even to our very westernised (and attractive) Turkish female guides from the marina.
The marina flyers for the camel wrestling had obviously been designed with Western European sensitivities in mind, by proclaiming to the assembled yotties that the camels were 'not damaged or hurt' in the event, which was 'like arm wrestling'. They seemed to think that it was important. They've obviously not met any Spanish.
The system works by subverting the camels' mating behaviour, whereby males compete for females by each trying to wrest the other to the ground and press him into submission. To wind this behaviour up the handlers set up a honey trap of an in season female who is led, prancing coquettishly, in front of the assembled males. Well, when I say 'coquettishly' I mean coquettishly for a camel, which can best be described as a sack full of spanners wrapped up in a matted, moth-eaten fur coat having a major epileptic seizure. It seems to work on the males though as they secrete large amounts of slobber from their mouths which foams up and drools and dribbles all over them. Every time they shake their heads, which is often, great spirals of spume fly in all directions, ending up in hair, faces and all over clothes. In fact, the only noticeable difference from human males in a similar circumstance is that the camels are also able to inflate their tongues, which hang out of the side of their mouths like great, glistening, crimson, vibrating, slather-covered bladders. Actually, human males would probably do the same if they could. There you go ladies - that at least is one thing to be grateful for.
We were the only non-Turks at the event and were welcomed profusely with the typical Turkish hospitality that we have come to expect and admire. After the camel wrestling we retired to a restaurant for a buffet lunch, only to find that there were five coachloads of tourists already there. There must have been nearly 300 packed in there, French, German and Dutch mainly. I didn't realise there were that many tourists in Turkey in February. What did they do - bus them in from all over the country?
You've got to hand it to the French, though. When it comes to food they know what they want and how to get it. While we Brits were milling around, finding seats 'After you Claude' - 'No, after you Cecil' etc, and the phalanx of Germans were heading determinedly to the buffet, the French had managed to slide in unnoticed, clear most of the food, sit down, eat it and be back for seconds before the rest of us had even worked out what was going on. How do they do that?
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10 Metre waves
9 Tree trunks floating
8 80 knot gusts
7 Shredded foresails
6 Tattered sprayhoods
Sixty three knot winds
4 Sea wall breaches
3 Tons of hail
2 Opened deck joints
And a scared cat behind the PC
It wasn't a bad forecast - Southerly 17 to 20 knots with some rain. And we were snugly tied up in a marina. Feeling smug and blasé Bob gave a quick turn around the deck, gave the lines and fittings a cursory once over and proclaimed everything satisfactory and secure before retiring for the night.
Hah!
We were woken at about 4 a.m. by the wind getting up and it deteriorated steadily from then on. The wind was from the South, blowing over our stern and the single stern line holding Birvidik off the concrete quay was bar-tight. The sky darkened further and the wind increased, howling through the rigging and throwing the boats about in all directions.
The bow was getting worrisomely close to the quay, a situation further complicated by the fact that the wooden buffers attached to it had rotted away, leaving a large, rusty steel bolt protruding 30 cm in the direction of Birvidik's hull. Bob crawled heroically onto the foredeck with the large bow fender, blew it up, positioned it between the bow and the quay and scuttled back into the cockpit.
The rain fell in torrents and the wind continued to increase. It was now blowing at about 45 knots (Force 9). The Southerly wind had a long fetch and had built up large waves pounding straight onto the shore and the marina breakwater. The boats were now rolling so much that the fenders between them were being rolled out, leaving the hulls to bang and grate against each other. Just to exacerbate things we had a large, rusty steel boat next to us which was threatening to give us a good hiding. We had to go out and reposition the fenders about every ten minutes.
The wind continued to increase, now accompanied by thunder and lightning, which grew steadily closer. Suddenly the wind fell to nothing - we were obviously in the eye of the storm, still surrounded by threatening black and purple clouds.
While we were standing in the cockpit, savouring the unnatural calm, there was a loud bang, just like a rifle shot and the boat rang with vibration. Completely disorientated we looked round, trying to identify the source. Then there was another, closely followed by a staccato of more, which steadily increased to a torrent as hailstones the size of eggs clattered down. The kinetic energy in these hailstones was immense and the noise was deafening. We couldn't hear each other even if we shouted at close range. The decibel level was so high that we had to cover our ears or it hurt. We stood there helpless, hoping the Perspex and toughened glass in the wheelhouse and hatches was strong enough to withstand the battering they were receiving. The decks and pontoons were 20 cm deep in hail. Our newly acquired cat completely freaked and skedaddled below to hide in the space behind the computer at the nav station.
Looking afterwards we could see the damage wrought by the hailstones. External instrument sensors had been shattered, the plastic windows in sprayhoods were shredded. A large polycarbonate roof onshore ended up looking like a pepper pot. We got off fairly lightly, with just our lifebuoys and man overboard recovery gear pitted and with chunks missing. Street lamps were shattered and the orange crops devastated. God knows what the hailstones' terminal velocity was, but I suspect they could have inflicted serious damage on an unprotected head.
Then the wind, thunder and lightning returned with a vengeance. It climbed to 50 knots (force 10) and then to 63 knots. At sustained 64 knots and above it is rated hurricane force 12. Huge waves were now bearing down on the shore and marina breakwater. Waves thundered into the breakwater and crashed over it, and water swept across the quays and poured into the marina, which by now had considerable waves of its own, although these paled into insignificance compared with the monsters sweeping past the entrance on their way to taking large chunks out of the town sea wall and promenade.
The electrical activity eased slightly, and just as we were thinking that it was starting to moderate, the sky turned an evil dark yellow-green and all hell was let loose. The thunder and lightning were right on top of us, with nasty similarities to The Unpleasantness at Mourtos and the wind climbed even further, screaming through the rigging and throwing boats about like lottery balls. Several boats lost their foresails, which were torn unfurled by the wind and flapped to shreds within minutes.
There were a series of gusts which were measured at between 70 and 80 knots before the piece de resistance, a gust which screamed in over the starboard quarter. Our inclinometer shows us the amount of lean up to 35 degrees from the vertical. It went right past the stops and still the boat continued to lean more and more, we were knocked almost flat on our side, unable to do anything other than hold on and hope we didn't get caught under the hull of the next door boat or end up with our masts entangled. This did, in fact happen to one of the boats, a 45 foot Bavaria, which caught its capping rail on the next door boat. When the two boats righted, the shear force lifted the Bavaria's deck away from its hull, leaving a large gap.
Slowly, the gust eased, Birvidik returned nearer to the vertical and we could resume moving about and panicking. Over the next two hours things slowly returned to some semblance of normality and the cat tentatively tip-toed out from behind the computer and began to reconsider the wisdom of its current choice of lifestyle.
The heavy rain and hail brought large amounts of flotsam down rivers and roads into the sea, including the marina. The water was thick with mud and covered in a deep layer of tree trunks, twigs and vegetation, which confused the local dogs, who jumped blithely onto it thinking it was just an extension of the devastated land around. Yotties spent many a happy hour pulling confused and disorientated dogs out of the water before the marina staff finished the laborious task of pulling all the flotsam out by hand using garden forks.
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We're now settled in to Finike for the winter. Finike is a bijou little town of 11, 200 inhabitants, nestling on the seaward edge of a semicircular alluvial flood plain surrounded by snow capped mountains. Most of the flood plain is dedicated to citrus fruit and growing vegetables under polythene. The Finike area exports oranges all over Europe. Here endeth the geography lesson.
The marina has a large number of overwintering boats and there are currently about 80 yotties living aboard. That means about one in every 140 people here is an overwintering yottie. That's not bad odds. All we need now are a couple of gunboats, a few heavily one-sided trading agreements and an unscrupulous disregard for the Turks' open friendliness and hospitality.
If you speak to most liveaboard yotties, one of the main reasons they give for choosing the lifestyle is a desire to get away from the regimentation and rat-race of their previous existence. Why is it then that, once settled in a marina for the winter, they instantly set up a regime of such fearsome regimentation that it would bring tears of envy to the eyes of a French Foreign Legion commandant?
Just take a look at the outline timetable shown above. This is just the standing agenda. On top of this are the extraordinary events which are shoehorned into any minute space inadvertently and inexplicably left vacant.
So far we've been to Beethoven and Mozart concerts, and a performance of Die Fledermaus in Antalya. The latter was not an unqualified success, performed as it was in Turkish. We went along under the naïve impression that an operetta was a little opera. Oh no it's not. It's as long as or longer than a normal opera (nearly 3 hours in this case) but with less singing and lots more talking. In Turkish. We had great difficulty in following the plot, but what we did manage to work out suggested it was, in essence, a Whitehall farce in 3/4 time. There was much opening and closing of doors, mistaken identity and rushing in and out of windows. No dropped trousers though.
However Liz, our resident aesthete and opera critic passed judgement that "The hall was nice and warm and the seats were very comfy". Can't argue with that for an in depth cultural analysis.
Bob has been attending the Turkish lessons, which have not proved up to explaining the intricacies of 19th Century Viennese farces, and the music club. Unfortunately this is populated in its entirety by guitarists, most of them extreme beginners. They can only play in the key of C. This would be fine for Bob, were the tenor sax not a transposing instrument. This would mean he would have to transpose into two sharps. His request that they transposed into two flats was met with either baffled stares or open hostility so he has settled, so far, for bawling out 'The wild rover' and 'dirty old town', more with gusto than musical sensitivity. He has, however, come across a flautist and they're going to have a go at some Jazz and blues together.
Liz ventured to the local hammam, or Turkish bath along with a group of other female yotties. The hammam is open to women on Tuesdays and to men on all the other days. Possibly the men are much filthier than the women (quite feasible) or Tuesday night is nookie night.
On entering the baths she was presented with a supposedly modesty-preserving towel the size of a large serviette (or 'table napkin' if you're posh) and waved over to the changing rooms. From there you go to the main room which is octagonal in shape and constructed entirely of marble. Each face accommodates an alcove containing seating and a supply of hot water.
After a few minutes of refined chat you are called one by one to the sacrificial slab. After a vigorous scrubbing, twisting, bending and dousing with water (hot and cold) she left feeling clean, refreshed and as if one nipple had been scoured off.
Bob was very excited by the weekly quiz night and scuttled down there like a dog with two tails, clutching his magic lucky pencil. Disaster. He has met his nemesis in the form of Sheila who has managed to whup his ass on each of the three quizzes so far. So he's going to get his own back by doing a quiz of his own that is so fiendish that even she won't be able to win it. (Fundamental flaw in logic here somewhere - ed)
We note from our perusing of the Jersey Evening Post website that Islanders are in fits of apoplectic self-righteous indignation about so-called 'health tourism' where bloody foreigners are flooding into the island with suppurating exotic diseases and conditions and conning the hardworking Jersey tax evaders ( Sorry - tax payers) into supplying them with medical services.
They could learn a lot from the Turks.
Ever since our flying visit to Portugal Liz has had a sore throat for about 4 weeks. Of course, with her extensive experience and knowledge of ear, nose and throat pathology she immediately thinks the worst and makes the diagnosis of throat cancer and imminent demise. Bob stuck a torch down her throat and said it looked more like a generalised inflammation of the soft palate to him, but she's the expert.
We enquired of the marina office and they said to go to the local hospital and make an appointment with the ENT department. So we did.
It was like a scene out of MASH. Finike is mainly an agricultural town. Very dangerous occupation, agriculture. The place was mobbed with people milling around with bandaged limbs, horrendous burns, patched up heads and blood everywhere, as if they'd just escaped from a war zone. Or I suppose it could have been St. Helier on a Saturday night.
Few people in Turkey, outside of the holiday hotspots, speak English, and Finike is a small little market town, well off the tourist trail, so it wasn't surprising that the reception staff spoke little or no English. They did, however, have a sheet of paper with the various departments listed in English and Turkish, so we pointed at ENT (KBB, since you ask) and made approving noises. The receptionist banged a few keys and waggled the mouse a couple of times and turned the screen to us, showing a large red rectangle containing the words KBB Dolu! (full). This was hardly surprising, given the heaving mass of suffering humanity around us, so we tried to indicate that we would like to make an appointment for a future, and one hoped, less crowded time.
At this point the combined efforts of phrase book, dictionary and sign language fell down. Despite the mob of people trying to get his attention, the receptionist kept smiling, indicated that we should wait to one side and made a phone call.
Soon after, a guy in blue scrubs appeared and asked us in English how he could help. We explained, and he said to wait a moment and waded his way through the walking wounded in the corridor. About five minutes later he returned and told us to follow him back whence he'd come. We waded through after him, trying not to exacerbate any injuries, and came to the KBB department, outside of which was a crowd of around 40 people all waiting for their name to come up on the screens above the door, which showed the lucky five at the top of the list.
He ushered us past the assembled throng and straight into the consulting rooms. We thought we were going to get lynched.
Once inside the 'Uzmani' (translates as 'specialist' - probably equivalent to consultant or registrar) examined Liz, who was pleased make the professional observation that he had 'all the proper gear'. He diagnosed chronic pharyngitis, thus putting Liz's mind at rest apart from the guilt about queue jumping which went into overdrive.
We went back to reception and paid the standard charge that a Turk would pay - 15 Turkish Lira, about 6 quid.
We were not just treated as well as the locals, we were treated better. As we were escorted out by our friend in scrubs, Bob asked him about our jumping the queue of almost certainly more deserving patients. "You are guests in our country" he replied. "It is our duty to be hospitable".
Sometimes even seasoned cynics like Bob are humbled by events.
Mind you, I don't know if the poor buggers in the queue would agree with his sentiments.
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